Category: GIT

Since posting recently about our Web based SVN push system , we have decided to take what we did there one step further and implement a very similar system for GIT, but with more options!

The web based GIT push system is, as mentioned, very similar to the web based SVN push system, with the exception that you can select branches before exporting the code.

I should stress before continuing that this system is not intended to be publicly visible on a website. Strict access controls need to be implemented in front of this implementation to protect the integrity and protect from malicious users. For example, only making this system available on a Development LAN, or putting it behind an IP restricted firewall, with IP restricted apache/nginx rules, web authentication and SSL will allow for a much more secure implementation of this system. My advice is to always assume everything is vulnerable at any time. Working backwards with that assumption has always been a good policy for me.

I’ll go through each file individually, briefly explaining what each file does.

index.php
This is a straightforward file. There is a small amount of php code embedded in this file with HTML to present the push page in a simple HTML table. An array is built for all the sites you want to push (in this example case its a Dev and Prod site). The array makes it very easy to add additional sites. Each array propagates a source, destination, site name and site url within.

The only field that is really used is the “pushname” variable in each site array. That variable gets passed to the shell script that actually takes care of the pushing mechanism.

The remaining php code in this file builds a list of sites based on the array, as well as pulling the current branch by running a function included in functions.inc.php that pulls all the branches associated with a repository and saves it to a text file for easy parsing. The other function pulls the last time the site was pushed or “exported”, giving an easy reference when dealing with multiple developers.

It should be noted that it is best to implement apache/nginx web based access on a per-user basis in order to access this page. This is because the index.php file parses the username of who is accessing the site for logging purposes. So every user that needs to access this needs an htpasswd user/password created for them for security and accountability purposes.

functions.inc.php
This file is where many of the functions lie (obviously). There is a crossite scripting function that is used to filter any submit input. I realize this is not very secure, but with the security considerations I mentioned in the beginning of this post, it should suffice. A good systems administrator would implement many hardware, software and intrusion layers to prevent malicious users from injecting content such as snort and mod_security. Nothing beats the security of a completely offline web accessible page on an internal LAN, obviously.

Next we have some functions that grab the branches, get the current branch that the site has been previously pushed on, some log file functions for storing the log file info and writing the log data and displaying it as well. All of these functions are intended to help keep the development process very organized and easy to maintain.

gitupdate_process.php
This file is where the index.php file POSTS the data of the site you want to push. This file receives the data as a $_POST (with the XSS cleaner function mentioned earlier sanitizing as best as it can) and then passes that variable to the push bash shell script in order to do the actual file synchronization.

It might be possible to do all the file synchronization in php, but I felt that separating the actual git pulling and rsync process into a separate shell script made the process less obfuscated and confusing. The shell script rarely needs to change unless a new site is added obviously.

log.php
This file is simply loaded as an iframe within index.php when someone clicks to view the export log. It parses the log.txt file and displays it. The export log format can be customized obviously, but usually would contain the site name, username who pushed, date and time as well as the branch pushed.

log.txt
This is self explanatory and contains the log information detailed in log.php

push.sh
This is the push bash shell script that gitupdate_process.php calls. Again this can be consolidated to be 100% PHP but I felt segmenting it was a good idea. You can see that the command line arguments are parsed from a $_POST in gitupdate_process.php and then passed to the shell script as an argument. This is very simple and shouldn’t be too hard to understand. The arguments would basically be the site name ($1) and the git branch name that was selected from the dropdown box before hitting the export button ($2).

That’s it! This package for GIT has made many developers’ life easier and caused less headaches when diagnosing problems or even rolling back to a stable branch. Keeping a stable and organized development environment is key here, with the security considerations I mentioned earlier being paramount above everything else.

I hope that this script was helpful and would welcome any suggestions to improve it further 🙂

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